Supply, Use and Input-Output Tables

Introduction

A modern open economy like that of Scotland engages in 4 basic economic activities:

• Production
  involves industries producing goods and services.
• Consumption
  represents purchases of goods and services by both industries and domestic final users comprising mainly households and Central and Local Government.
• Accumulation
  involves all capital transactions including all fixed investment expenditure and stock change.
• Trade
  involves imports from, and exports to, the rest of the UK (RUK) and the rest of the world (RoW).

The input-output tables and multipliers for Scotland serve a number of purposes, all of which contribute in different ways to our understanding of the Scottish economy.

The Supply Table

In broad terms, the Supply Table allows the user an appreciation of the absolute monetary values of each industry's output for a given calendar year. Additionally, and possibly more importantly, this table also presents the relationships between the output of products and the output of industries - e.g. key statistics are produced on the extent of diversification within industries and the extent of competition between industries producing the same product.

The Use Table

The combined Use Table shows the consumption of products (goods and services) and primary inputs, in terms of combined domestic and imported goods and services, used in each industry's production process and, in doing so, presents a comprehensive description of the domestic production functions of Scottish industries.

The Symmetric Tables

In addition to the descriptive value of the tables noted above, the derived Symmetric Tables also provide the tools for economic impact analysis, which is one of the main uses of the IO tables once they have been published. The derived Industry by Industry and Product by Product Tables present very similar information to the Use Table outlined above; but present the information on a common (symmetric) basis. The Industry by Industry Table presentation allows the interdependence of industries to be formally examined as each industry is shown as intermediate purchasers of their own and other industries output. These interdependencies are shown in standardised form in the Leontief Inverse Tables, which show, for each industry, the direct and indirect (type I) and direct, indirect and induced (type II) effects upon total output of an additional £1m of final use. These latter tables are the key tools used in Input-Output based impact analyses.

The following sections describe the key Input-Output Tables published by the Scottish Government, beginning with the two basic balances - the Supply Table (summarising the supply of goods and services in basic prices and transition into purchasers' prices plus imports) and the Use Table. Descriptions of the Industry by Industry table and multipliers are then given. Each section aims to give a brief overview of each table, showing what the data represents and how it can be used for analysis.